Information Literacy, the Information Society and ... · a new ‘Information Literacy’ is a necessity in the modern information landscape – and also that this skill offers hope

Information Literacy, the ‘Information Society’ and international development 1

Information Literacy,the Information Society andinternational development

report of a meeting

On 21 January 2003 a meeting was convened by the Information for Development Forum (IDF), hosted in London by the British Computer Society Developing Countries Specialist Group (BCS-DCSG). The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the topic of

Information Literacy

in the context of the preparations for the United Nations

World Summit on the Information Society

(WSIS).

The World Summit on the Information Society is to be held in Geneva in December

,

with a follow-up event planned for Tunis in

. W

will be organised by two agencies: the International Telecommunications Union (

) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (

).

In mid-

, the

National Commission on

, met to consider the preparations for

, and it was through participating in that meeting that the

was prompted to call its own seminar, as described below.

had already produced a preparatory document for

, which we quote later in this meeting report (see page

). Paragraph one of that document argues that a new ‘Information Literacy’ is a necessity in the modern information landscape – and also that this skill offers hope in overcoming ‘many of the problems confonting human societies’.

This claim presents an interesting challenge to members of the Information for Development Forum, which was

set up in

to co-ordinate and collaborate on issues of information for international development. At that time – in the days before

s – ‘information’ was understood as meaning bibliographic records, classification schemes, thematic cataloguing and subject-controlled vocabularies. The

has held a couple of meetings every year since it was founded.

In reaction to

’s claims, it was decided that the

should convene a meeting to discuss the concept of Information Literacy in the context of

, and the Developing Countries Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (

-

), which is a member of

, took responsibility for hosting this.

-

has also provided resources for the production of this report of that meeting.

Participants for the

meeting were contacted via a number of electronic mailing lists,

1

and members of the

committee were contacted through its secretariat. The chairs of all the specialist groups of the

were contacted, and the Electronic Publishing

1. Lists used included

Information for Development Forum

(www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eldis),

BCS-DCSG

(www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/bcs-devel), the librarianship community (www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/lis-link) and the

National Forum on Information Planning

(www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/nfip)

2 Information Literacy, the ‘Information Society’ and international development

Specialist Group showed particular interest. Through these approaches, plus personal contacts, responses of interest were built into an email list, which then went through a series of discussion cycles and exchanges of position papers. In November

a Web site was constructed

2

to hold these papers and other links and resources in preparation for the meeting

Originally the meeting was scheduled for

th December

, but it was found that this date would clash with an event on Information Literacy organised by the company Task Force Pro Libra (

). The focus of the

meeting was to be Information Literacy in the context of the business community, whereas the focus of the

is international development and the overcoming of poverty, but we decided to postpone the

meeting until January

so that people could attend both and because these two constituencies need to collaborate.

A discussion in rounds

The meeting on

January was structured around a number of cycles of discussion, following a preparatory round of introductions in which participants declared their backgrounds and ‘enthusiasms’ and how they viewed the concept of Information Literacy.

After this, we had a discussion round dubbed ‘The archæology of knowledge’. The intention here was to discover how many different experiences and viewpoints might cast light on a meaning of Information Literacy.

One discernable distinction may be that between the approach of those people who teach or help people to be more skilful in accessing sources of information (mainly information professionals operating in academic and library contexts), and those whose work focuses on making such sources of information easier to access and understand (such as authors and editors, designers, publishers and

experts). What transpired from the discussion, however, is that these viewpoints are not opposed to each other. If information is thought of as‘coin’, these two communities are experts on different sides of the same coin, and have much to learn from and contribute to each other.

We discussed whether the advent of

s brings some-thing genuinely new to the ‘information society’ of which

speaks, or simply represents a continuation of what has been for a long time. The answer probably is ‘both at the same time’. The issue is to decide what is new and in what way, and what it incorporates; which

elements of the old are as relevant as ever, and which will to be discarded or modified. This could be difficult for professionals whose intellectual integrity might have to be discarded simply because what they know is now wrong or less relevant than formerly.

Bodies of knowledge

The theme of the second ‘round’ was on the existence of bodies of knowledge. A search on ‘Information Literacy’ within Library and Information Science Abstracts (

) produced

results, of which the large majority were concerned with library skills in higher education, and the impact of the Internet on undergraduate learning. Such a perspective is clearly much too narrow to apply to the whole world community, where information policy must take into account the information needs of poor people whose concerns are daily survival and economic development, not academic achievement.

There are clearly many bodies of knowledge, many not yet codified or brought into being; one might more use-fully speak at this stage of ‘communities of knowledge’. As well as the obvious case of Library and Information Science, the emerging and somewhat overlapping disci-plines of Information Design and Human Computer Interaction were also represented within the meeting, each concerned in its own way with understanding how people approach and access sources of information, and how to design those sources more effectively. Linguistics and translation were also put forward as relevant communities of knowledge with perspectives to contribute on information policy.

Models of Information Literacy

From here the discussion turned to whether there are useful models of Information Literacy. One that was discussed in detail was that produced by the Society of College, National and University Libraries (

) in Britain. The

model tends to focus on informa-tion skills that are relevant in higher education. Our group did wonder whether it was possible to extract an even more generic model of information literacy which could apply convincingly to the needs for information and problem-solving of the rural and urban poor.

Among other points made were about the inadequacy of such a ‘librarianship’ model to explain how sources of information are designed, created and propagated, and the importance of the sometimes problematic role of ‘information intermediaries’. In societies where direct

2. http://www.ideography.co.uk/wsis-focus/ — constructed by discussion participant Conrad Taylor on his own web site.


access to sources of information is limited and skills in handling information are not widespread, information intermediaries are ‘gatekeepers’ who have the power to facilitate access to information, but who often control, filter or bias information or deny it to those of whom they don’t approve.

However we understand the roles that information and knowledge, decisions and action play in international development, there must be some relation between (a) the workings of ‘knowledge factories’ (which includes universities) (b) the governance of the polity at different levels, and (c) the life and practice of communities, which is where development is located. Much more work needs to be done if we are to understand how information is produced by those communities in practice, how that impacts on governance and feeds the knowledge factories, how this process is understood and how it contributes to information literacy. But at least we have an idea of the best well known models to start with.

This concluded the aspect of the day that was intended to cover the past, what was already known, to provide a starting point and foundation on which we might then proceed.

Communities and agendas

The second half of the meeting had the aim of planning for future action. It was apparent from the morning’s discussion that all present shared a ‘pro-poor’ agenda. This agenda provides a special class of problems and needs, distinct and sometimes opposed to the priorities of other communities of information literacy. The business community, the

industry and the higher education sector were identified as other communities, and there might well be more.

The Globalisation and Development White Paper (

) of the

’s Department for International Development (

) can be taken a starting point. There we find concepts of knowledge and research in international development, the concept of an International Public Good and the concept of Intellectual Property Rights. From here we can engage in a discussion of what the contribution of the British government should be to the World Summit on the Information Society.

We discussed what the core contribution of information practitioners and professionals might be, with the initial suggestion that it was the ability to work with metadata and taxonomies. This, it was clear, was too narrow a muster of the competences around the table. Other ones significant in the context of the

agenda are skills

in design and publishing methods and technologies, and skills in teaching them, which could be important in empowering communities to make their own inform-ation and to publish their own voice.

This shows in some measure the state we are in. Shifts in meanings and representations, and the practises of the professional societies and publicly funded institutions have exacerbated the old distinction between the boxes and the books, between the

professionals and the information professionals, which was part of the original reason for setting up the

.

Frameworks for future work

Finally we considered what institutional framework there might be for future work on Information Literacy and the

agenda. One opportunity is the Framework

research agenda of the European Commission, the first call for which was published on

th December

.

It was agreed that we need to participate in other inter-national forums to promote a pro-poor perspective, to head off the tendency to reserve privileged access to information and freedom of expression. The mechanism for moving forward on this probably resides in vigilance and opportunism.

The offer was accepted of a further meeting at the University of Plymouth when there is enough new material to review and develop further.

This report is produced in a somewhat unusual form – as close as possible to a verbatim account of what was said, in order that it might be plundered by anyone who wishes, for the development of further argument out of the discussion strands reported here. Some diagrams have been added, either because they were produced during the meeting or were alluded to.

Our thanks are due to the

for enabling the production of this report, to Conrad Taylor for its editing and preparation, and to participants at the meeting who contributed clarification and editorial suggestions.

John Lindsay

Chair,

-

Note:

this meeting report has been edited from a recording of the meeting. Names appear in bold primarily to show where there was a change of speaker. Thanks to all participants who helped me with clarifications and suggestions. My special thanks to Susie Andretta for her editorial help. —

Conrad Taylor


An account of the discussion on 21 January 2003

The discussion participants, and others in the circle

John Lindsay started the day’s meeting by suggesting that we make a first round to introduce ourselves and explain our ‘enthusiasms’. Various different perspectives on information were revealed…

Clifford Morse —

Associated with

-

for many years, Clifford is an ‘enterprise data architect’ with a supplementary concern about development issues. He has recently been active lobbying on develop-ment issues raised by

(the General Agreement on Trade in Services of the World Trade Organisation).

Pat Norrish —

currently an independent consultant in Communication for Development. ‘Communication’ in this context means the whole gamut, from face-to-face meetings, to all the different media, including the new

s. Previously she worked at the University of Reading in the

(Agricultural Extension and Rural Development Department), a postgraduate department primarily for students from developing countries. Currently Pat chairs the Steering Group of

, a

-funded programme on Health Communication, and is on the steering group of

(Natural Resources Systems Programme) advising on communication. Her interest is in communication projects associated with developing-country programmes of action for development.

Justine Johnstone

— teaches Information Literacy at London Metropolitan University, which is an amalgam-ation of North London and Guildhall Universities. The University requires all entry level students in the Depart-ment of Art, Media and Design and the Department of Applied Social Sciences to study Information Literacy, and Justine teaches on the humanities side of the curri-culum. Her own research is concerned with knowledge and Internet use in developing countries. She is keen to see how a broader discussion of Information Literacy might reflect on how they teach the courses at London Metropolitan University.

Susie Andretta —

Also from London Metropolitan University, Susie initiated the provision of teaching on Information Literacy (

) at the University of North London five years ago, and is now responsible for the delivery of the

module in London Metropolitan’s Department of Applied Social Sciences. Her principle interest is in Information Literacy as a tool for independ-ent learning. Susie’s work on

does not have a direct

link with developing countries, but her consultancy work in Sierra Leone and Ukraine has made her realise that the technological infrastructure of a country determines what is or is not feasible in implementing programmes of Information Literacy, especially where

s are involved. In her view, the most effective approach to

provision is one based on appropriate technologies that address local and national needs.

Penny Trigg —

Penny is the Information Manager in the British Council’s team for the

National Commission for

. The National Commission is preparing for

by responding to requests from

to gather specialists to critique its position papers on policies for the Summit; John Lindsay has also been involved in this process. One of their reports has made its way onto the

Web site, and the rest of the work they have been doing can be found at unesco.org.uk. The work of the National Commission is currently under review; they are waiting for a decision from government as to what the Commission’s future will be. A report submitted to Ministers can also be found on the Web site.

Sue Hughes — Sue’s background is in business informa-tion; she managed a wide-ranging information service for the and has worked overseas in business infor-mation consultancy, setting up business information centres in Egypt. She recently took over as Head of the Information Society Sector at the British Council. Sue explained that the British Council is keen to explore the topic of Information Literacy; little work has been done yet, but they want to make sure that those with whom the Council works worldwide understand the implications of issues. At the same time, Sue is trying to ensure that the Council is connected to all initiatives related to , and hopes to develop work-strands on this across the Council, up to the Geneva Summit in , the Tunis summit in , and beyond.

Andy Smith — Andy has been on the - mailing list for years. A Reader in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Luton, he believes there’s an overlap between concerns of and concerns about usability of information systems. His main topic of research is on


cultural differences in usability, and how to build systems that are usable in different cultural contexts. He recently started on an -funded project looking at usability in India, working with a network of contacts throughout India on a whole range of issues – the Indian industry, localization issues, and the generation of usable systems from the ‘bottom up’ in poor and remote communities. He will be involved in similar project work in China.

David Penfold — David has a scientific background, and works as a publishing consultant; he is also the Chairman of the Electronic Publishing Specialist Group (-) and sits on the Knowledge Services Board. David has reviewed many projects for the European Commission within their programme of support for research in information and communication technologies, especially on multimedia tools and content. Editorially, he has worked on publications on worldwide renewable energy and the environment. He is also the author of two of the study guides for the ‘European Computer Driving Licence’ scheme ().

Conrad Taylor — A freelance teacher and consultant in electronic publishing and information design, Conrad has built and continues to maintain the Web site created to support this meeting. His involvement with issues of development and the environment go back to teenage years; he worked for Third World First and the Europe/Third World Research Centre, and has been active in Asian human rights campaigns. His recent voluntary engagement has been with Black community projects in the . He also helps to maintain InfoDesign-Cafe, a discussion list on Information Design on the Internet, is on the editorial board of Information Design Journal, and is Secretary of -. Conrad considers non- information delivery systems to be still important. He is interested in how we create, design, lay out and typeset, publish and organise information materials to make them as easy as possible to access and understand.

Brian Layzell — Treasurer of -, Brian has spent most of his working life in the Department of Health, introducing computing systems into the Health Service from the days of mainframes onwards. He retired from the o eight years ago and now works as a consultant in systems security, data security and business continuity, mostly for clients and some overseas clients. Brian recently became chair of a group concerned with issues of disability and accessibility, e.g. hardware and software design, information design and screen arrays. He commented that accessing information through new technologies such as the Internet and a laptop computer is something a lot of people in the developed societies are

familiar with, but in parts of the world where health and social care provision are inadequate, and the economic infrastructure is fragile, the ability to disseminate information is similarly hampered.

John Lindsay — John is a Reader in Information Systems Design at Kingston University (), where he specialises in strategic information systems, information science and information systems design. He is a Member of the British Computer Society, and chairs the Developing Countries Specialist Group. He was long an Associate of the Library Association (now merged with the Institute of Information Scientists to become ). For thirty years, John has been interested in the relation between information and the organisation of power in society – as described below in the section on ‘the archæology of concepts’. He helped set up the Information for Develop-ment Forum and the Transport Information Planning Forum, and through both became a representative to the National Forum on Information Planning. In the s he set up Librarians for Social Change, and the Need to Know project at South Hackney School. He is currently involved with the task group working on the government white paper on e-commerce.

Other contributorsJohn Lindsay then gave a brief description of the people who had been involved in the email discussion group in preparation for this day’s meeting, but who were unable to attend in person.

Mark Perkins — For a long time in the Information for Development Forum in Britain, Mark was the Librarian of the Overseas Development Institute, and for the last couple of years has been working in the Pacific.

Alan Hancock — Alan has occupied a senior position in , and has been involved in the work of the Commission on . His special interest is the role and contribution of the media.

Pat Hall — Pat is Professor of Computing at the Open University and has been a member of the Developing Countries Specialist Group for a long time.

Justin Smith — Director of the Information Literacy programme at Plymouth University, Justin has a back-ground in Librarianship.

Jill Needham — Jill is responsible for the Information Literacy programme at the Open University.

David Baldon — Editor of the Journal of Documentation, David teaches at City University in London. He is also the only British representative on the official


working party on Information Literacy – a body which, it appears, has not actually met to date.

Val Skelton — from 3, Val was one of the organisers of the meeting on Information Literacy on the th December , at which Sheila Corrall, incoming President of , was the closing speaker.

Judy Stephen — Information Manager for Oxfam, and the chair of the Information for Development Forum.

Rosemary Raddon — Rosemary was Deputy Director of Learning Services Support in the former Inner London Education Authority (). Recently she worked in Sri Lanka on Information Literacy in a rural bank project.

Peter Murray — Peter works as an independent health informatics and telematics consultant, and is also an Honorary Research Fellow in Health Informatics at King Alfred’s, Winchester. He co-ordinates the Education, Training and Development task force of the Health Informatics Committee; sits on the Executive Committee of the Nursing Specialist Group; and is also ’s representative to the International Medical Informatics Association. His interests include health informatics in developing countries and the potential of open source software to help in those situations.

The discussion begins: towards an archæology of concepts

John explained that he draws the idea of the ‘archæology of concepts’ from Michel Foucault’s ideas of an archæo-logy of knowledge. ‘These old ideas have shards that still can come up and get you in the foot,’ he said. He started by drawing our attention to papers he distributed at the start of the meeting. One of these was a copy of the first page of ’s Strategic Orientation to the World Summit. Paragraph One reads:

The emergence of the Information Society is a revolution comparable to the deep transformation of the world engendered by the invention of the alphabet and the printing press. A new culture is emerging, based on symbols, codes, models, programs, formal languages, algorithms, virtual representations, mental landscapes, which imply the need for a new ‘information literacy’. Information and knowledge have not only become the principal forces of social transformation. They also hold the promise that many of the problems confronting human societies could be significantly alleviated if only the requisite information and expertise were systematically and equitably employed and shared.

Surely, said John, the assertion that there is a ‘revolution’ going on similar to the invention of the alphabet and the printing press is contentious? If the invention of the printing press led to the cutting off of King Charles’ head, as Christopher Hill argued in The World Turned Upside Down, whose head will roll as a result of this revolution? Do we really think a fundamental transformation is being caused by these developments in technology? If so, what will it be? Our particular concern, John suggested, should

be the role of the professional societies, of which some of those present were chartered members.

As for the issues listed by – ‘symbols, codes, models, programs, formal languages, algorithms, virtual representations, mental landscapes’ – do we recognise that list? Does it make any sense to us? Would we have some other list we would be happier with? John also pointed out the language about equitable sharing of information and expertise, and the use of the buzzwords ‘information’ and ‘systematically’. It was that first paragraph which suggested to John, at a meeting of the National Commission on which Penny Trigg also attended, that a follow-up meeting should be organised to try to work through these issues. This, then, was the rationale leading to the current day’s meeting.

John also passed around an editorial, ‘Information Literacy: a New Frontier’, from the Newsletter,4 written by Philippe Quéau, the Director of ’s Information Society Division. John found it interesting that information is described in that article as a ‘new frontier’. However, John finds the ‘frontier’ metaphor distasteful: it suggests the killing of natives and bison… Nor is he happy with the idea of Information Literacy, a topic we’d return to. However, Quéau does seem to tackle some of the big issues which should be examined in this day’s discussion.

As for John’s personal ‘archæology’, it goes back to his time as a trainee librarian in Durban, South Africa in the s, when Black people were excluded from the public

3. TFPL is a company which works in areas of information and knowledge management and library systems. The meeting on 12 December 2002 was called “Joining In: the benefits of information literacy”. Speakers were: Marc Aukland (BT), Angela Abell (TFPL), James Binks (CBI), Sheila Webber (Sheffield University), Stephen Town (Cranfield University), Carey Craddock and Angela Donnelly (Unilever), Jenny Brook (Huddersfield University) Lynn Barrett (Dixons City Technology College) and Sheila Corrall (CILIP and Southampton University).

4. UNISIST Newsletter Vol. 28, No. 2, 2001 — pp 3–4.


library system by an act of law. In theory, a separate ‘but equal’ Black library system was going to be set up, but this was clearly not happening. That seemed to John to be a real professional challenge; though he had not yet done his exams in librarianship, he still felt as if he had a professional obligation to do something.

John reminded us what the emergent communication technologies were in the ’sixties – early dry-toner photo-copiers, Letraset, Banda spirit duplicators and mimeo-graphs, and small paper-plate offset litho presses. John assembled a group of progressive South Africans willing to show people how to make their own books, create their own voices. For a while, he was also editor for the youth organisation of the Progressive Party. This continued until he felt he had to leave South Africa.

John then ran a project called ‘The Need to Know’, at South Hackney School, funded by the British Library. Also about years ago, he was involved in setting up the Gay Switchboard, in recognition of the isolation and marginalisation felt by many young gay people. The Gay Switchboard ensured such wide publicity for its phone number that no-one could remain ignorant of it. The Information for Development Forum started not long after, in . Then John was asked to join the , and the Royal Society of Arts, and has been agitating on ‘pro-poor policies’ in those contexts ever since.

John ended by pointing out that Clare Short had brought a pro-poor agenda into the public arena in the government’s White Paper on Globalization.5 So John begins to think that he is at least partially ‘cutting with the grain’ for the first time in his career as an information professional.

Clifford described his long-term interest in literacy of the traditional sort, through his involvement with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an American-based organisation which (in support of Christian evangelism) has been helping to create writing systems for traditional languages that have not hitherto been written down. Almost all these projects involve literacy issues; the creation of new scripts and orthographies have to be followed up by teaching people how to read and write with them, and how to find their way around a written document – for some of those communities, the written word is a new concept.

Clifford’s other strand of interest is in getting computers to understand each other. Computers are rather good

at the syntax of languages, he said; but the semantics – the meaning contained within those texts – evades them. He thought there must be some overlap between these subjects – literacy, and natural language processing – and today’s area of discussion.

As for his role as an enterprise data architect, Clifford said that this job sits between the business and its data. The job of the data architect is to ensure that gathering and structuring the data is done in a way that promotes effective business management. Data architects have developed some interesting semi-formal techniques which might find application in Information Literacy.

Pat’s background involves years living and working in Thailand, Ethiopia and Ghana, where for much of the time she worked in educational television and radio. In Ghana, during the first Sahelian drought, the challenge was how to communicate drought-related issues to illiterate farmers using print material.

At Reading University, it fell to Pat to teach the literacy component of the in Rural Development overseas students. Pat recognised the power relations wrapped up in literacy. Too much literacy teaching has concentrated on how to teach people to read. For Pat, the real concern has been to teach people how to write – the power is in the pen, so to speak. The Reading communication curri-culum for all masters students focused on how to ‘write’ across the media spectrum so that people could under-stand the power relationships around information and its creation.

In her current work there is a lot of emphasis on issues of information provision, and universal access to it. There is also an understanding – or misunderstanding rather – about the role have to play in this. An organisation may set up a Web site to disseminate information without sufficient thought about what this means for everybody, particularly those beyond the end of the infrastructure. - are also increasingly popular, but issues of appropriateness and content remain.‘Let’s send out -s about how to break it to a woman that she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer’ was one proposal. Just think about that in a developing-country context – it doesn’t make sense to do it this way (which is not to trivialise the needs of those women who need to be diagnosed and to receive treatment).

Pat mentioned a project funded by Engineering: the Knowledge and Research () Programme, highly

5. “Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the Poor.” White Paper on International Development, December 2000.See http://www.globalisation.gov.uk/WhitePaper/FullPaper.pdf


oriented towards the use of s in disseminating infor-mation. Pat was involved in a small way in a project called ‘Sustainable s’ (primarily a sharing of case studies). What she found interesting was that most of the projects running ‘sustainably’ were those where the initiative came from within the developing country, rather than ‘injected’ from outside. It might seem so obvious; but many fail to understand the obvious!

To illustrate other uses of in development, Pat mentioned a project for rainwater harvest-ing – a big issue for Tanzania and other African countries where rainfall and water supply can be problematic, and also in South Asia too. This work uses a computer modelling tool called ‘-’, with which users can simulate the most important processes in a rainwater harvesting system, incorporating simulations of the growth of sorghum, maize and millet under semi-arid conditions. The aim for such projects is to make the planning process as participatory as possible, in spite of the great distances involved when the creative expertise is in one country and the users are in another.

Justine said she was concerned about where the bound-aries of ‘information’ and ‘information literacy’ lie; she worries that these concepts are in danger of becoming so diffuse as to become useless. As an example, she drew attention to part of the Philippe Quéau article circulated earlier by John Lindsay:

I see four aspects to Information Literacy:– the ability to access meaningful information

(and exclude garbage)– the ability to develop a capacity for personal

evaluation and critical thinking– the ability to participate in the public or

collective information spaces– the ability to memorize and nurture roots

Justine is comfortable with a definition of Information Literacy that is about accessing information, searching and sorting, but she is not comfortable with expanding the definition, as Quéau does, to include personal evalua-tion or participation in political life, however noble the sentiments may be.

Justine’s own background is in philosophy, particularly epistemology (the theory of knowledge), so she has an interest in defining boundaries between information and knowledge – asking what added value ‘knowledge’ has which can be excluded from a definition of information. The teaching of skills at London Metropolitan University touches on skills in evaluating information, which comes close to knowledge skills. In research, for example, how can one evaluate an information source

without evaluating its reliability? At that point, said Justine, one is beginning to talk about knowledge.

Though we may not wish to exclude topics that fall outside a strict definition of Information, we need to be aware that boundaries between information and knowledge are extremely nebulous. When knowledge comes into the picture, so do such factors as conceptual frameworks, people’s world views, values, and issues of power relations; also issues such as motivation: why people are looking for information in the first place, and what information is considered to be relevant. The issue is not just about access to information: we already have more information than we can cope with. Similarly, there are all kinds of knowledge which we may have no interest in acquiring. So, while endorsing the importance of the current debate on Information Literacy, Justine favours a more critical view of what this means.

Susie said that she didn’t know she was ‘information literate’ fifteen years ago; had she then known what she knows now, her contribution to Information Literacy would have been more comprehensive. Her task since has been to try to get her Higher Education insti-tution to take on Information Literacy as a learning and teaching target, and integrate it into the wider curriculum. So far this has been extended to out of Metropolitan’s , student population. The issue of integration into the wider curriculum is a political one, and contentious as well.

Susie admitted her experience at a global level is limited, but her work in Sierra Leone offers a good case in point. She found that programmes designed to train librarians in that country were biased towards and towards written English culture – in particular the work of Shakespeare, the study of which was compulsory at all levels. This contrasted with a primarily oral culture in Sierra Leone, in which neither nor the work of Shakespeare were relevant or useful.

Susie therefore suggested including ‘oral literacy’ in our discussion, since in developing countries much knowledge is contained within an oral tradition. Information can also be descriptive/pictorial in its form of delivery, so perhaps pictorial information can be as important as written language in some societies.

In Ukraine, working for on a project to develop distance learning, Susie experienced the power of the myth of computers as ‘the answer to everything’. The Ukrainian partners dreamt of an Internet and Intranet infrastructure covering the whole country – yet, in the capital city of Kiev, it was often impossible to make a


simple phone call from one building to another. The role played by s has to take into account the quality and availability of the local/national infrastructure.

Susie emphasises that s do not equate to information literacy. She reminded us that Alan Hancock, in a state-ment circulated to the group before the meeting, had talked about ‘tool literacy’ and ‘publishing literacy’ – these are other facets of Information Literacy we need to explore.

Motivation is an important issue, as Justine had said. Why do we look for information? Especially in higher education, buzzwords such as ‘lifelong learning’ are in circulation – but the discussion is very top-down. People need a more bottom-up perspective on lifelong learning.

The disempowerment of learners in developing countries seems similar to the marginalisation of some learners in the (especially in institutions like London Metro-politan) who, owing to lack of independent learning skills, are unable to engage effectively with written infor-mation. There seems to be a psychological dissociation between the learner and the written word. We have come full circle, from an oral culture to a written one and back again – the written word now seems to be shunned by our students. (Maybe that is a bleak picture, but it matches experience at London Metropolitan. Oxford University might promote a different perspective!)

Penny has experience of teaching English overseas, in a university where the only technology was one Gestetner duplicator for the whole English department, and black-board and chalk. At the British Council, much of Penny’s experience has been as an editor in their publishing department, working on products from promotional leaflets to English language books, and exhibitions. She has also produced a science education newsletter that is circulated worldwide. This experience influences how she approaches the topic of information and its provision.

At the British Council, Penny acts as an additional ‘door’ to for specialists and Civil Society groups in the who want to engage with what is doing. She said that ’s position on Information Literacy is not a clear one. On one hand, it claims we need a ‘new’ Information Literacy. During consultations on policy in preparation for the World Summit, people have raised the important roles of educators and Information Literacy, and these expressions have made their way into ’s public statements. However, ’s Web site offers little on Information Literacy;

one has to go behind the scenes to discover ’s thinking on . John Lindsay had found out that there is an topic group in , but appears not yet to have met. Penny thought that could benefit from input from groups like this one gathered today; she was sure there would be opportunities to add thinking from this group to what is beginning to coalesce at .

A couple of years ago, the National Forum on Infor-mation Literacy had approached and said ‘We need to be thinking about Information Literacy’. Ross Shimmon from the International Federation of Library Associations () produced an article a couple of years ago for , ‘From Digital Divide to Digital Opportunity’,6 in which he discussed Information Literacy. So, there are circles of people out there willing to engage with on this question. If we keep coming back to and saying, ‘This still hasn’t been addressed’, they will listen, she thought.

Sue said the British Council is already involved with what could be described as ‘Information Literacy’ projects, but is struggling with definitions, and how to support projects so they will reach the widest number of people.

A workshop was held in mid-January to look at these issues in the build-up to the World Summit. One of the stronger ideas was to use links with young people with whom the Council already works across the globe, and to look at ways to use existing British Council projects to help champion Information Literacy issues.

Sue also said that the British Council is also interested in the ‘cultural diversity’ agenda.

The British Council is engaged with two kinds of topic. One kind is driven by a country-by-country or region-by-region agenda, but there are also topics on which the Council works more globally – for example there is an arts agenda, a youth agenda, and so on. The Information Society is currently perceived in the Council as one of those global themes. Sue wants to find clear, thoughtful messages about Information Literacy that the British Council can spread through its network, in a way which respects established local agendas and cultures.

Andy returned to considering how the ‘information revolution’ compares to the invention of the printing press, writing or number systems. In his view, this analogy is questionable. Helping people to access the written word or number systems is ‘a one-way problem’ – by teaching literacy or numeracy, we do not influence the

6. http://www.unesco.org/webworld/points_of_views/shimmon.shtml


word or number system itself. is different, because the way we offer it to people can be extensively custom-ised. This puts an onus on us to provide information in a form that is easy to access. It may be inevitable that new users always require training to make use of -based information systems, but a lot can be done to mitigate that by making these systems more usable.

Andy reminded us of his interest in cultural issues, and picked up on Pat’s comment that information systems which prove to be of real use are those built locally. In his research, Andy tries to discover what we need to understand about localisation needs in different cultures. He drew a distinction between ‘internationalisation’ (where you develop one system and propagate it globally, which may include translation), and true ‘localisation’. Localisation has to engage with cultural diversity, and it requires much more research, but it is necessary to make sure we have a proper understanding about the usability of information systems in a global context.

David said that he has worked as an editor for about years, the first on international scientific journals. Most of these were written in English, with about % in French and % in German. He became aware that a German writing in English would not necessarily be understood by an Indian writing in English, although another German might understand it! This led to occasional arguments with authors about rephrasing.

David also referred to his wife’s experience as a primary school teacher in Yorkshire. In one of her classes, there was only one white child; the rest were Muslim children from Pakistani or Bangladeshi backgrounds. During the first Yugoslav crisis, some Bosnian refugee children were placed in the school because it was thought appropriate to put them with other Muslims; but the white European, Bosnian Muslims were a completely different cultural element to those of Asian descent, born and brought up in England. Communication between these two groups was a problem. Perhaps solving problems of communi-cation within British society is an appropriate starting point.

For a couple of years, David has managed production of the Cancer directory. A recent project of this organisation is concerned with making information about cancer available to members of Black and other minority communities, particularly since it has been noted that there is a problem persuading many of these to communicate their symptoms at an early enough stage; they typically wait until their symptoms are grave. Is this

due to a mismatch of communication styles? Does this illustrate a cultural aspect of Information Literacy?

Like Andy, Conrad expressed caution about character-ising the emergence of the Information Society as a revolution parallel to the invention of the alphabet and printing press. He had studied the history of knowledge-diffusion in the Mediterranean and Middle East from the th to th centuries – including technical and develop-ment information, such as agricultural and irrigation techniques. The duplication of such texts in Hebrew and Arabic, for a paying public, was commonplace in the Muslim world at this time and employed many people. Before that, the Romans also had mass publishing using the reprographic ability of educated Greek slaves. The printing press just made the process more efficient; likewise the current new technologies, in so far as they are carriers of culture and information, are just an extension of the process, a new quill and parchment.

Conrad has always been interested in technologies of cultural production. As a graphic designer in the early s he sought more control over typesetting quality, and for that reason learned how to use computers and ‘desktop publishing’ software. Through his connections with Asia, this interest has extended to studying problems of multilingual typesetting.

Paradoxically, he said, many problems of typesetting West African languages had been caused by the well-meaning missionaries who tried to produce simplified spelling systems by devising a unique glyph for each distinct sound. These letterforms are easy to write with a pen, and simplify learning how to read and write, but have left a messy legacy to the Information Age due to the lack of fonts and other software resources to typeset, process and present languages such as Yoruba, Krio or Twi.7 Conrad is interested in finding ways to transform computing, to enable better and more multilingual communication at an affordable cost for African and Asian communities. Might the adoption of and OpenType help? Could a fund of public money be created to pay competent type designers to create multi-lingual font resources that could be given away free?

Finally, Conrad is interested in how to teach Information Design skills. How do you teach people to write better? to design better? to produce better diagrams and maps? How do you get people to understand what the design process is? He has taught these skills for years – not in formal education, but in the private sector. His scholar-ship and teaching is done from the standpoint of a craft-

7. See Conrad Taylor’s illustrated study Typesetting African Languages, available as a PDF from www.ideography.co.uk/library/afrolingua.html


worker who is interested in building a theory for his own practice, and communicating skills to others. He has also been evolving methods for teaching practical ‘crash course’ training in writing, design and media production.

As a design educator standing outside Higher Education and looking in, having seen friends struggle with their and h theses, Conrad had been horrified by the apparent inability of many university supervisors to support their research students in basic writing and editing skills, clear communication, and document design and production. He argues that this too is a literacy problem…

Brian started by saying that Conrad was not alone in not having a university degree; Brian got a ‘proper job’ instead of going to college, working with arc-welding equipment to design and build cooling systems for glass furnaces. That was a practical education in how one has to understand a process and how it works, and how one can learn by practising under the guidance of a skilled supervisor. Eventually one can become sufficiently proficient to devise improved methods.

In looking at technology-based information systems, we ought not to lose sight of the legacy we inherit from past systems. Whatever is done in business, public service or the armed forces is the result of years of development, layer upon layer of solutions – each using what seemed the best technology then available to do what was deemed politically necessary at the time.

Brian’s major work experience is in health computing. This started in the ’s in a particular matrix of political aspiration, managerial ability, financial resource and technical capability. Nobody ever had enough money and political clout to go for a ‘big bang’ solution; developments were always incremental, organic and uncoordinated, with people in different sectors using different tools for different purposes.

Health computing started on a handful of very large, expensive mainframes in major teaching hospitals; they needed artificial environments and false floors, water-cooling and air-conditioning systems. Later on came the ‘minicomputer’ systems which didn’t require such cossetting. More usable programming languages and development environments came along, so software could be developed by the people who were going to use it, rather than needing a ‘priesthood’ of programmers speaking in non-demotic tongues. Most recently we have seen the impact of the consumer electronic boom, the microchip and economics of mass production, so that now a computer is produced as cheaply as a television.

Telecommunications have experienced similar develop-ments. It is no longer necessary to pre-book international phone calls with a switchboard, nor does the conversa-tion travel through two bits of copper from end to end. Telecommunications have become digital, multiplexed, linked by satellite, wireless, and this has opened up the world in general.

When people need to use technology to improve what they do, they have two choices. If they have a legacy of older systems, they must make a decision about what to change it to. But if they have nothing at all, for example if their country has no pre-existing computing infra-structure, they won’t go down the same route that the developed world took; they will take advantage of what is currently available. If you talk to people in government institutions and hospitals in various parts of the world and ask, ‘What do you want from us?’, they are not going to say, ‘Can we have your old computers?’ They want the state-of-the-art stuff.

Similarly, in terms of information resources such as medical libraries, they don’t want a roomful of back numbers of the British Medical Journal, they want the same new material as is available to colleagues in the industrialised countries.

The problem is, how can countries with infrastructures dissimilar to our own be empowered to access this infor-mation? At international medical conferences, you hear people remarking that everyone can get onto the Internet these days, or that -s are so cheap that there’s no need for printed information. This attitude doesn’t help those who don’t have the technical means to access these information sources. It is unsatisfactory to assume that everyone can make use of the information systems we have got; what is needed is a realistic appraisal of what they really need and how they would use it.

Technology must be appropriate. It does not follow that people without advanced technology should continue to have nothing, but nor does it follow that you can throw the latest electronic gizmo into the situation and expect people to cope. Problems of implementing such systems may be fundamental – such as lack of mains electricity, still a basic obstacle to widespread use of computing and telecommunications. Trevor Bayliss managed to devise a viable clockwork-driven radios – can we imagine clock-work televisions and computers, or solar power enabling computing and telecommunications?

Brian recalled that some years ago in Zambia, the public telephone system reached a point where it crumbled almost to nothing, similar to the situation in Kiev that


Susie had described earlier. As those telephone systems crumble they are not replaced, because the oligarchy in power has the means to set up a private mobile phone system. They can make phone calls from their Mercedes, while the rest of the population has to walk ten miles to the nearest working telephone.

Ten years ago, Brian was involved in liaison work with officials from the Scientific-Industrial Centre of Genetic Ecology in Tblisi, Georgia. They told him that since the break-up of the old Soviet Union, they were forced into

using the Internet because of the inadequacy of the ordinary phone system: it was easier for a government institution to get secure phone lines for an Internet connection. They were also forced to use email as a substitute for fax, not because of the inadequacy of the telephone system but because they couldn’t get paper for their fax machines. This raises the question about what we mean by the ‘appropriateness’ of technology – really, it just means what makes sense at the time.

From local to global

John used the flip-chart to construct a five-layer model of how ‘local’ connects to ‘global’, taking his own situation as an example. At his base layer is the University of Kingston where he works. Above this is a layer of informal bodies, such as the Information for Development Forum, where individuals get together to achieve particular ends. Above that, John placed the institutional and professional communities such as and the .

As the next higher level, John’s diagram placed a range of government departments; in education, the key one is obviously the Department for Education and Skills. However, as the Globalization and Development white paper claims to articulates the British experience to the international community, many ministries and depart-ments could be seen as being drawn in here. The British Council, largely funded by the Government, and the , can be considered to be in this layer.

The top layer is the international one. is part of that and the Commission on is one gateway to it. Other gateways for some will be the International Federation of Library Associations, and the International Federation for Information Processing.

John thought it interesting that in the previous discussion round, telephones were mentioned only at the end. His guess is that mobile phones with and text-messaging will make a big difference at the technology level. Nor had anyone mentioned the , the lead body in organising . No professional societies seem to be lobbying on the telecommunications issues.

In the past John has referred to what he calls ‘the argu-ment between the boxes and the books’ – the librarians and the computer-people. In years of this argument we have achieved almost no synthesis of the intellectual skills of librarians and programmers. But when one has three factors – boxes, books and telephones – then the repertoire of actors and opinion-holders is enlarged.

In come the journalists, editors, , radio, television and so on.

John’s next spoke about the traditions of literacy, starting with Richard Hoggart, who wrote Uses of Literacy. He thought that all of us here today would support bottom-up approaches to literacy which ask whose voice, whose reality counts. We also all seem to realise that writing is an articulating and politically organising skill, in a sense more important than reading. We seem to acknowledge that there is a certain tyranny in text – it produces a form of structure in thought which is linear, and many cultures and forms of political organisation require other ways of doing things. We also seem to agree that historically it was the people with control of the printing presses who controlled the ideas, and would also seem to agree that we have an obligation to do change this.

Historically, most people could see, hear and speak. Then the printing press increased the need for wider skills, and it is probably true now that most people in the world can read, write and count.

If we were to add the word draw as well to this list of useful skills, things become richer and more complicated. And if we throw the computer, the telephone and the television together, something new emerges – and with that, a new barrier, yet another new set of required skills, and a new opportunity about which to think.

David thought that the advent of desktop publishing, and latterly the Web, could be said to be revolutionary. These developments have reduced barriers to getting things published, in the broadest sense of the term. The amount of information that circulates is now much greater as a result. (However, its reliability has become more problematic and uncertain.)


Bodies of knowledge, and models

John drew our attention to one of his questions, namely, ‘Is there an organised body of knowledge on the subject?’ – or more than one? In answer he would include , the Library of Information Science Abstracts; , the Education Resource Information Centre… these would need to be explained with a paragraph, noting also their difficulties, their contentiousness and so on. John said he would not include Inspec (The Database for Physics, Electronics and Computing).

The British Computer Society does not in any meaning-ful sense have a library; the Library Association destroyed its library. We could also take it as a sign of weakness that the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Council was forced to produce a set of resource guides for researchers in the social sciences, to try to inform people about what resources are available – John waved them at us.

We know almost nothing about ongoing projects in Information Literacy and we have a really elementary job to do. Sheila Webber has done part of it with her Web site, and Conrad with his. We have the basis for putting some-thing together very quickly. But, asked John – apart from and and Inspec, does anybody have any other ‘big containers’ of knowledge?

The Information Design perspectiveConrad said he had never been clear what John meant by ‘an organised body of knowledge’, but he is aware of an evolving body of craft knowledge within the field of Information Design – an area of practice that has had to get to grips with a workable definition of Information as well. He asked the meeting’s leave to run quickly through the last thirty years or so of this intellectual tradition.

Designers are often bad at theorising their practice, said Conrad. For many kinds of product, you don’t need to be good at theorising to produce good designs, and the kind of visual thinking involved in designing a product or a poster doesn’t uniquely or mainly use words as its currency. For traces of organised thinking about design, one could start with the Bauhaus before . László Moholy-Nagy also had a well organised view of the inter-relationships in decision making in design projects. After the Second World War, ‘modernist’ typographers made new efforts to co-ordinate design form & function. Also at that time there arose a burgeoning technical communication industry – people writing and designing

instructions, manuals, interfaces, public transport maps, wayfinding and road sign systems, and other means of making information accessible. It’s interesting that it was who paid the bill for am early Information Design conference at Het Vennenbos, The Netherlands in .

Conrad described Liz Orna’s model of information viewed in the context of attempts to communicate it: one starts with knowledge (personal, internal, tacit) from which one creates information by organising its form, so transforming it into an information product which can be picked up and interpreted by somebody else. In this model, information is designed with an intent to communicate it. Readers take this information, interpret it and make some kind of sense of it from within their own perspective: that in turn produces knowledge. Many people in the Information Design community, Conrad thinks, would see information and its relationship to knowledge in that kind of light.

There was a time when information designers thought of improving communication of information as essentially a process of clarifying and simplifying how it is presented. Legibility research was one prong of this, feeding into Jock Kinnear’s designs for the British road sign systems. At the same time there were pro-clarity campaigns for ‘Plain English’, and against ‘gobbledegook’ in official writing (e.g. Ernest Gowers, Plain English Campaign).

At about the same time, students of communication theory were seduced by the Shannon/Weaver model of communication, based on a Bell Labs study of signal propagation.8 Breakdowns in human communication started to be explained in terms of ‘noise’ or ‘interference’ undermining the clarity of the ‘signal’. This model implies that if you have failed to communicate, it is because the message is not straightforward and clear enough, or you have presented it in an illegible or confusing fashion. That was a valuable insight, but unfortunately one which tended to regard readers as passive vessels for receiving information.

Now we have progressed beyond this to a concept of the active recipient of information. Studies of Human-Computer Interaction helped to increase awareness of the need for user-centred design. If we think of users/readers as active partners in communication, we become aware of how they unpack our ‘information product’ and interpret it, influenced by their experiences, cultural backgrounds, political viewpoints, and so on.

8. Shannon, CE and Weaver, W. (1948) A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal no. 27.


Within Information Design and there is increasing interest in ethnographic studies and anthropological research undertaken to find out how any particular intended audience (e.g. American teenagers, Bangladeshi women, medical staff) sees the world; this insight then can guide the design of information products created for them. Often this may involves projects in cross-cultural communication, because there are practical reasons why not every message intended for a particular group can be created by a member of that group.

The emphasis on interpretation has gone to extremes at times – some ‘post-modern’ theorists seem to argue that you can’t be sure of communicating anything to anyone. But recent studies – for example Alan MacEachran’s How Maps Work and Colin Ware’s Information Visualization – have drawn equally and usefully upon cognitive science and semiotics to construct a model of how signification works. Exploring what is universally human, and what is culturally constructed, a workable body of Information Design theory is emerging.

The KISUP modelsJohn noted that Conrad’s contribution had moved us in the direction of considering models of Information Literacy. He referred to a project and Pat Norrish had worked on, called ‘Strengthening the Knowledge and

Information Systems of the Urban Poor’ (), which had been funded by . Three models were produced during this study. One was the ‘Windmill’ model, one was called ‘No blankets, no Hallelujahs’ and one which John called ‘::::’. Pat commented that she had written a paper on models for that same project, emerging from case studies in Peru and Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.

Other communities of knowledgeClifford suggested that before we moved onto models we should recognise two other relevant communities of knowledge. There is a lot of knowledge involved in the business of translation – taking knowledge embedded in one language and getting it into another. The European Union is a useful place to look for such knowledge; they have to get their communications translated into various members’ languages. Extending the European Union will render this much more important, and more expen-sive, and it will not be possible to employ translators to translate all documents between all language pairs in an extended Union. Therefore they propose to translate everything to an intermediate form, and from there out to all the official state languages in the Union.

The second area is knowledge in the industry around business intelligence and data warehousing, where huge

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Key Community membersKey informants or ‘infomediaries’

Two models from the KISUP study

In the Windmill Model, communities are beset with problems in eight identified areas, each represented here by a rectangle. Living within those communities there are infomediaries who communicate with other info-mediaries at the national and international level, and it is on these than community members depend for access to information that will help them solve their problems.

In the U::G::C Model, the U stands for universities and other ‘knowledge factories’ who produce and manage sources of information. G stands for ‘governance’ and stands for all levels of government and administration.C stands for the Community.

The double colons are meant to indicate a bidirectional flow of information between the knowledge-factories and Governance, and between Governance and the community.

U::G::C


quantities of data measured in petabytes () have to be managed. A business needs to be able to get into that data and find out what it contains so the executives who run it can make informed decisions. There is a sub-profession developing around this area – not just the technical aspect, but also focusing on making that information available and visible. This is a community which could have a useful input to make to our discussions.

Pat wondered about translation in relation to developing countries, and populations beyond ‘the last mile’ of connectivity to s, beyond the infrastructure. (Some-times it’s called the first mile to focus attention on those who don’t have access to s.) There is great demand there for local information, local content, in the local language; people want to know about their local markets, their local transport systems. Translation might in those situations be rejected in favour of empowering people to create their own information, in their own language.

In considering the language issue, Pat thought there is a difference between the introduction of printing and the new information technologies. The printing press opened up access to writing in the vernacular; it enabled people to have materials in their own languages, not just Latin. With the Internet, such diversity is not so enabled; English has come to dominate it. The issue of multiple language support is therefore a very important one. People go to market, watch films and read newspapers using their language. Yet much of the support for local languages seems to be shoved aside in the desire to push global information sources.

Conrad commented that the computer and the old-style printing press both suffer from the technical problem of requiring fonts to be created before they will work multilingually. The dear old Banda duplicator and the photocopier don’t have that problem: materials can be originated for them by hand, and in any script.

David thought what Conrad had said of the computer’s limitations was not necessarily true: Christina Preston at the Institute of Education had worked with populations whose language had no written form. Conrad agreed one could use technology to side-step the need for literacy: audio tape has been used as a publishing medium in projects in Bolivia.

Pat said that she was also familiar with projects where the need for literacy had been bypassed using tape recorders, or cheap cameras, in response to demands from donors for reports and pictures of projects. This kind of demand from donors has also thrown up the challenge of a ‘culture of reporting’ where a report is deemed

appropriate only if it is in a certain format. Trying to get funding agencies to accept other forms of reporting has been difficult.

On issues of linguistics and translation, John added that the databases of the Modern Languages Association () are probably the closest thing to an organised body of knowledge in that area. Yet it is most likely that, just as with and and Inspec, these warehouses of information are heavily oriented towards European languages, towards the interests of Western Europe and the United States, and that the way that the controlled vocabularies and taxonomies work is problematic for the ‘pro-poor’ environment. John pointed this out in in a paper for and the British Library; and he thought that ever since then there has been no progress in dealing with the problems he then identified.

Clifford pointed out that none of those present would be here today, if they weren’t disposed to acknowledge a gap between the Western situation and that in other parts of the world. But while we are looking for ways of bridging that gap, the Western world is not stationary; the width of the divide is likely to get dramatically bigger. Digital television linked to a broadband cable will soon bring huge amounts of information to the Western audience. Clifford sees little hope that the rest of the world will catch up. David replied that he didn’t see it as being as simple as a straight divide between The West and The Rest. After all, there are poor communities in Europe and in Britain which are also on the wrong side of the digital divide – the issue is one of the rich and the poor, whether in this country or across the globe.

Evaluating information – and its sourcesSusie agreed that access to information is important, but there are also important questions about the learner, the person who is receiving the information. At London Metropolitan University, the challenge is how to raise learners’ level of competence so that they are able to do something with the information they find. Learners need to develop the analytical and reflective skills that enable them to take advantage of the information available. The fact that her students don’t possess these competences reinforced her view that access to information on its own is not sufficient, and that the recipient must be able to use the information provided in order to complete the process of information transfer.

Brian sees a parallel problem arising from the availability these days of a great deal of information on the Internet for clinicians and patients about health conditions and their treatments. On the whole this is good: patients are


empowered to educate themselves about the conditions which afflict them. But there is also the problem of know-ing whether all this information is accurate and reliable. Is there a role in Information Literacy for discussions of validation of such sources? In the and the European Union there has been a lot of work done to develop quality control standards for information of this sort.

David pointed out that validation/approval schemes still require the user to understand the significance of the validation logo or whatever else signifies the status of the information. This is so, said Brian; that’s why he

wonders about extending our definition of Information Literacy in this direction – to include the ability to evaluate metadata attached to information about its validity and reliability.

Pat commented that validation of information by some authority is fine in theory, but doesn’t mean that users will accept that validation. In much of the work she does in agriculture, poor farmers like to hear validation which comes from other farmers, as much if not more so than that which comes from scientists. Different kinds of user will want validation from different authorities.

Pro-poor and other agendas – constituencies, taxonomies and topics

John remarked that as part of the discussion on lifelong learning and widening access to learning, the National Forum on Information Planning has tried to start a debate about the nature of the Information Society in Britain. John is trying to get Amartya Sen9 to speak at a public meeting about this.

The Information for Development Forum took part in preparing material for the draft of the White Paper on Globalization and Development, and commented on the consequences of the White Paper. Recently, the has also been involved in the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, which was set up by Clare Short as a result of the White Paper. The result of this Commission was a document of pages10.

During our introductory round, Clifford had mentioned , the General Agreement on Trade in Services, and the role of the World Trade Organization. In the argu-ments in the lead-up to , it seems we would be on ’s side, arguing for educational, scientific and cultural co-operation, freedom of expression and access to information, as supported by the Declaration of Human Rights. But the other major players at the World Summit will be the and the World Trade Organisa-tion, who will promote arguments about the intellectual property rights within the rhetoric of the free market.

John said he had intended to structure this afternoon’s discussions to find out if we shared a pro-poor agenda; but it had already become clear that we did. He therefore suggested that we proceed by finding out what other constituencies and agendas we recognise.

At the meeting in December it became clear to John that the business world is one constituency to consider. Information Literacy clearly has a meaning in that context. It is also obvious from the paper that there is a Higher Education domain. There’s also a health domain – the issue of health promotion and health information is a large one with interesting challenges.

Taxonomies and models of learningJohn suggested a taxonomy based on age-experience. Between ages and there’s primary and secondary education – relatively well-structured and relatively well-formulated, although Information Literacy is as weak in it now as when John did the Need to Know project thirty years ago. From to we have tertiary education and higher education, where the structures are pretty well in place. The government target is to include % of the British population in that sector, which raises the question of what is going to happen to the other % – and what’s going to happen to the % of the rest of the world who aren’t part of that system at all.

From to , suggested John, we have the lifelong learn-ing whole-life experience. Susie challenged this, saying that ‘lifelong’ can’t terminate at … John replied he was thinking in terms of the relatively formal workplace experience of wage labour, the experience of % of the population. Susie questioned whether a work-oriented understanding of lifelong learning was one we were prepared to accept, or whether we should embrace a wider definition.

9. Amartya Sen is the author of Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973, 1997), Poverty and Famines (1981), Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), Resources, Values and Development (1984), On Ethics and Economics (1987), The Standard of Living (1987), Inequality Reexamined (1992), and Development as Freedom (1999). His next book, Rationality, Freedom and Justice will be published by Harvard University Press as a Bellknap Book, in 2002. He is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge UK, and co-chair of the Commission on Human Security.

10. “Integrating Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy”. Report of the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, September 2002. Available http://www.iprcommission.org/papers/pdfs/final_report/CIPRfullfinal.pdf


Pat said that this model of learning worked well for Northern countries, but in the South working popula-tions are often largely illiterate, and not in a structured learning environment. In the South there is a whole layer of intermediaries who provide and interpret information and help others to understand it. Such is the situation for the vast majority of the world’s population. John replied that he thinks the majority of the world’s people now live in cities – urbanisation make the world a different place. Pat replied that while this trend and its consequences are undeniable, there is still a large rural population. Information on agriculture and environmental manage-ment – be it for urban, peri-urban or rural populations – must be part of the Information Literacy we are discussing.

John suggested that another taxonomy might be to divide the world population into the % who have access to huge resources; a bottom % living in dire circumstances; and the groups in between. So wealth becomes another axis for the discussion.

Brian returned to the age breakdown, and questioned whether this would really apply outside of the Northern societies. Is there any point in thinking in terms of this scale of age progressions from pre-school through school and college and into structured work experience, when it doesn’t apply to the majority of people in the world? David, Pat and others agreed that in societies where work might well start at age and many will die before age , this taxonomy would not usefully apply.

John suggested that in that case we would need to find another way to organise our thinking. Every society has some device by which children take on the inheritance of their parents, then go through the process of themselves becoming parents and passing on their knowledge.

Pat commented that one issue around the generational transfer of learning, whether through structured school-ing or other forms, is the impact of the epidemic,

which in many countries has destroyed a large part of the ‘transferring generation’.

Problems that information can solve?Conrad suggested that if the point of our discussions was to relate Information Literacy to a pro-poor agenda, we must look to problems which aren’t literacy problems in their own right – problems of health, or access to clean water, or preventing environmental degradation, or improving crop yields. One of our tasks could be to draw up a list of key issues where providing better information to more people could make a critical difference, and concentrate our efforts on those. Examples might be the control of malaria, or improving agriculture.

David suggested we should add technology transfer to that list, in particular where application of intermediate technology could solve problems, such as water desalin-ation or solar power. Information is necessary not only for the construction of these solutions, but also for their sustained maintenance.

John said that in the project there was a consistent identification of the main issues as being:

health, water, sewage, housingwork, money, security, getting places

Pat suggested we could present these goals by referring to the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, a list which carries great rhetorical force in international discussions these days. These goals include halving extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, etc. In the context of building a list of problems amenable to improvement through access to information, maybe we would pick different list.

But John criticised the Millennium Development Goals’ use of the criterion of a dollar a day as the price of labour. It implies a formal wage economy, oriented towards turn-ing people into wage-labourers in a money economy.

Our skills, our contribution?

Are we agreed, asked John, that our competence as information specialists is partly about building models and taxonomies – trying to get this discussion into some sort of structure, some sort of order? Conrad said that might be part of our contribution; but if he considers his own core competences, they are not about building taxonomies and models. Rather, they are about how to transfer skills in creating better information resources.

In response to another comment by Conrad, John agreed that taxonomies are highly political, which is why one can spend so much energy arguing about them. It is amazing so little has been written about this, though he has discovered a book called ‘Sorting Things Out’11 which looked at three or four case studies, for example the way in which Blacks were catalogued and classified in apartheid South Africa. Yet the politics of classification appears to have been completely unrecognised.

11. “Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences” by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. 1999, The MIT Press; ISBN: 0262024616


Conrad agreed, noting how ‘working class’ means one thing within Marxist discourse, in terms of a relationship to the means of production, and quite another to market researchers. Pat talked about the problematic category of ‘the poor’ – phrases such as ‘the poorest of the poor’ are often resorted to, but nobody quite seems to agree what they mean by ‘the poor’.

John sought to move the discussion forward. If in making this collection of taxonomies we have an entry for ‘interface design techniques’ and ‘technologies and tools’, what else can we add? Conrad replied that there was certainly some expertise around this table around issues of multilingual computing and translation, in relation to making information accessible. That pool of expertise could be expanded through our networks, for example through -.

Listening across the digital divideSusie said that she had difficulty reconciling her position, based in higher education in the UK, with thinking about an information literacy model that can be implemented in different environments and in societies very different to the . She couldn’t see a link between the way we try to integrate Information Literacy into higher education in Britain, and how we should think about Information Literacy outside of an educational context in countries with different levels of economic development and different cultures.

Conrad thought that we might learn by listening to other voices from far away; he cited the website of , the Women of Uganda Network, involved in issues of s in society in Africa; and the African caucus within the Association for Progressive Communication ().

But Susie asked: are we talking about here, or about Information Literacy? Brian agreed that we should not allow a definition of Information which would make it synonymous with . Conrad replied that he agreed with that distinction in principle; but surely we are aiming to set specific targets in relation to the World Summit on the Information Society? It was his under-standing that the topic of Information Literacy was being

discussed today in relation to the agenda. If we are to orient ourselves towards the process, then we should note what sort of topics are being raised by the civil society organizations in Africa, for example, and some of the concerns they are expressing is indeed about the ‘digital divide’.

John thought we were in danger of going over ground that had been dug over many times before. ‘What Infor-mation Literacy is’ as a wider topic is a big discussion. At present, we have a useful moment in time because of the World Summit. What we want to do is to make sure that the views that we value are not brushed out of existence by the rhetorical power of the free market//telecomms service providers. Our goal is therefore to provide the British Government and with the best arguments we can provide them with. The only reason that there is any debate at all about information in society at this moment in time is because of the new technology.

Taxonomies have been around since we wrote on clay tablets, said John. A land registry related land parcels to land owners, to a list of outputs of the land parcels, to the amount of tax that had to be paid – all done with , clay tablets rather than noughts and ones in an electronic box. Those farmers clearly understood the relationship between owning a land-parcel, growing a crop and pay-ing a tax; and those simple things haven’t changed at all.

But if we consider issues of health, housing, taxes, water, security – people living in cities around the world know that their life experience has now reached a certain level of complexity at which they can no longer manage. That produces a new problem, said John, in which people have new information needs.

In this situation, those of us with professional obligations to design information systems for people are ‘shoving tanks into people’s gardens’, as John put it. We may think of our ‘tanks’ as a beneficial form of interference (water-

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Information Literacy, the Information Society and ... · a new ‘Information Literacy’ is a necessity in the modern information landscape – and also that this skill offers hope